The Foundation of a Fruitful Forgetfulness Text: Psalm 105:1-6
Introduction: The War on Memory
We live in an age that is pathologically obsessed with the present moment. Our culture is a frantic, churning machine designed to make you forget. It wants you to forget yesterday's promises, last year's resolutions, and the last millennium's wisdom. It wants you to live on a diet of digital junk food, consuming an endless stream of novelties, outrages, and distractions, all of which have the shelf life of a gnat. The goal of our secularist overlords is to produce a populace with historical amnesia. A people who do not know where they came from cannot know where they are, and a people who do not know where they are cannot know where they are going. They are rootless, and therefore, easily moved.
Into this deliberate chaos, the Word of God speaks a radical and revolutionary command: Remember. The Bible does not see memory as a dusty attic of useless facts. It sees memory, and specifically the memory of God's mighty acts, as the very foundation of a stable and sane life. It is the anchor that holds the ship of your soul steady in the hurricane of the now. Without it, you are driftwood.
Psalm 105 is a covenant history lesson set to music. It is a summons for God's people to ground their entire existence, their worship, their joy, and their strength, in the bedrock of what God has actually done in history. This is not a call to sentimental nostalgia. This is a call to arms. The acts of worship described in these first six verses, giving thanks, singing, boasting, seeking, are not quiet, private, pietistic exercises. They are public declarations. They are broadside cannonades against the idols of the age. They are the weapons we use to fight the war on memory, and in fighting that war, we secure our joy.
What this psalm teaches us is that a fruitful forgetfulness of self, which is the heart of humility, can only be built on the foundation of a faithful remembrance of God. You cannot forget yourself in a healthy way until you have something, or rather Someone, far greater to remember.
The Text
Oh give thanks to Yahweh, call upon His name; Make known His acts among the peoples.
Sing to Him, sing praises to Him; Muse on all His wondrous deeds.
Boast in His holy name; Let the heart of those who seek Yahweh be glad.
Inquire of Yahweh and His strength; Seek His face continually.
Remember His wondrous deeds which He has done, His miracles and the judgments uttered by His mouth,
O seed of Abraham, His servant, O sons of Jacob, His chosen ones!
(Psalm 105:1-6 LSB)
The Cascade of Worship (vv. 1-3)
The psalm opens not with a suggestion, but with a fusillade of commands. This is the grammar of grace; God's imperatives flow from His indicatives. Because of who He is and what He has done, this is our required and joyous response.
"Oh give thanks to Yahweh, call upon His name; Make known His acts among the peoples. Sing to Him, sing praises to Him; Muse on all His wondrous deeds. Boast in His holy name; Let the heart of those who seek Yahweh be glad." (Psalm 105:1-3)
Notice the motion here. It is upward, outward, and inward. The worship begins directed upward: "give thanks to Yahweh," "call upon His name," "sing to Him." This is the fundamental orientation of a creature to his Creator. Gratitude is the baseline of Christian sanity. An ungrateful Christian is a contradiction in terms, like a square circle or a humble politician. To call upon His name is to acknowledge His authority and His presence. He is not a distant, deistic clockmaker; He is the God who hears and acts.
But this worship cannot be contained. It immediately moves outward: "Make known His acts among the peoples." This is not an internal, private affair for the stained-glass ghetto. This is public and polemical. It is evangelism. We are to go to the nations, to our neighbors, to our coworkers, and tell them the news. What news? Not our feelings, not our opinions, but His acts. We are to be historians of redemption, telling the world that our God is the God who splits seas, topples empires, and raises the dead. This is a direct challenge to every other god and every other worldview.
This upward and outward worship is fueled by an inward reality. We are to "muse on all His wondrous deeds." The word muse means to meditate, to turn something over and over in your mind. We are to fill our minds with the highlight reel of God's redemptive work. And the result of this musing is that we "boast in His holy name." This is the only kind of boasting the Bible permits. We do not boast in our righteousness or our accomplishments. We boast in what He has done. And the inevitable, commanded result of all this is gladness. "Let the heart of those who seek Yahweh be glad." Joy is not a temperament; it is a duty. And it is a duty that flows naturally from a mind and heart saturated with the deeds of God.
The Continual Pursuit (v. 4)
Verse 4 describes the ongoing posture of the believer. This is not a one-time event, but the rhythm of a lifetime.
"Inquire of Yahweh and His strength; Seek His face continually." (Psalm 105:4 LSB)
To inquire of Yahweh is to consult Him, to ask for His direction. It is the opposite of the autonomous spirit of our age, which says, "I am the master of my fate." The Christian says, "The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord." We are to inquire of Him, and of His strength. We do not come to Him for advice and then try to carry it out in our own power. We recognize that He is both the source of the command and the source of the strength to obey it. This is the death of self-reliance.
And we are to "seek His face continually." What does it mean to seek His face? It is not a vague, mystical quest for a feeling. God's face is His presence, His favor. And where has He shown us His face? He has shown it to us preeminently in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). We seek His face by immersing ourselves in His Word, where He reveals His character. We seek His face in prayer, speaking to Him as our Father. We seek His face in the fellowship of the saints, where Christ is present among His people. And we seek His face at the Table He sets for us, where we commune with Him. To do this "continually" means it is to be the constant, background hum of our lives. It is the operating system that is always running.
The Bedrock of Remembrance (v. 5-6)
Verses 5 and 6 provide the foundation for all the preceding commands. Why should we do all this? Because of what must be remembered.
"Remember His wondrous deeds which He has done, His miracles and the judgments uttered by His mouth, O seed of Abraham, His servant, O sons of Jacob, His chosen ones!" (Psalm 105:5-6 LSB)
Here is the central command: Remember. This is the linchpin. Our thanks, our songs, our boasting, our seeking, all of it is fueled by memory. And what are we to remember? Three things: His deeds, His miracles, and His judgments.
"His wondrous deeds" are His great saving acts in history, the whole story that the rest of the psalm will recount, from the covenant with Abraham to the Exodus and the conquest. "His miracles" are the supernatural signs that accompanied those deeds, demonstrating that this was no accident of history, but the direct intervention of the living God. And we are to remember "the judgments uttered by His mouth." This is His Word, His law, His decrees. God's actions and God's speech are inseparable. His Word brings about His actions, and His actions confirm His Word. We are to remember both what He has done and what He has said.
And who is the "we" who must remember? The psalm identifies them as the "seed of Abraham" and the "sons of Jacob." In the Old Covenant, this was literal, ethnic Israel. But the New Testament throws the doors wide open. The Apostle Paul tells us plainly that "if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (Galatians 3:29). By faith in Jesus, the true Son of Abraham, we have been grafted into this family. This history is now our history. The Exodus is our deliverance. The covenant is our covenant. We are the chosen ones, not by bloodline, but by grace.
Conclusion: The Great Remembrance
This entire psalm points us forward to the ultimate wondrous deed, the final miracle, and the definitive judgment from God's mouth. All of God's saving acts in the Old Testament were shadows and types, pointing to the great substance that was to come in Jesus Christ.
The greatest of His wondrous deeds is the incarnation, sinless life, substitutionary death, and victorious resurrection of the Lord Jesus. The greatest miracle was the empty tomb. The greatest judgment from His mouth was the cry, "It is finished!" followed by the verdict of the Father in the resurrection, declaring that the debt of sin had been paid in full.
This is what we are called to remember. And God, in His wisdom, has not left this remembrance to our faulty, distractible minds alone. He has given us a tangible, physical, edible memory aid. He has given us the Lord's Supper. At that Table, Christ tells us, "Do this in remembrance of Me." The Supper is our Psalm 105. It is where we give thanks, sing praises, and boast in His name. It is where we seek His face. It is where we remember His wondrous deeds, His miracles, and the judgments of His mouth.
So let us obey the command. Let us turn off the noise machine of the world and ground our lives in the history of our salvation. Let us remember what our God has done, for in that remembrance, we find our strength, our identity, and our gladness. We remember Him, so that we might fruitfully forget ourselves. We remember His story, so that we might find our true place in it.